Arcane Archers~

Kireina - Dreamweaver

I think you'd need over 50% channeling to even make up for the lacking DPS as an Arcane Archer.

And that's just with skills, in a lot of situations normal hits are much more effective.

Fleuri - Sanctuary

Kireina - Dreamweaver wrote: »

I think you'd need over 50% channeling to even make up for the lacking DPS as an Arcane Archer.

And that's just with skills, in a lot of situations normal hits are much more effective.

I would be interested in how you reached that conclusion. I posted an example where 15% channelling made an arcane archer match a pure archer in skill damage. And, normal attacks might be cheaper to use but in my example (post 63 in this thread) the arcane archer's rate of fire with skills was faster than normal shots with a sling shot, unless you were in really specialized circumstances (like maybe a boss fight against a metal immune boss with a tank that could keep a pure archer from pulling aggro even though the pure archer was attacking for the whole time and not having to wait for the tank to build threat nor pause because of getting too many crits).

Alyyy - Sanctuary

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wtf?



no comment just no comment...>_>....


FAIL!!!


archers are meant to be LA not arcane

Archers_Soul - Lost City

dont be stupid guys robe archers fail. take the rigth path and go heavy and robe. pfft... ya need to learn.

Nelae - Heavens Tear

Just awesome AA archer, i feel my troll level getting higher with every page i read about this....but at the end i gets so sad its not even funny b:shockedb:shocked

Now why not just put +MP in your gear if you need more MP?

Kireina - Dreamweaver

Fleuri - Sanctuary wrote: »

I would be interested in how you reached that conclusion. I posted an example where 15% channelling made an arcane archer match a pure archer in skill damage.

I dont see damage tables anywhere, just a pwcalc with an LA-Channeling Archer. with pure archer I assume you mean a DEX built, LA Archer without channeling **** and stat/crit-adding gear. Channeling does not make you match an Archer in skill damage, because channeling adds no damage. Rephrase that sentence if you meant something else. As it is, you're claiming channeling = increase phys.atk.

But I still stand convinced you would need a buttload of Channeling to come close to a DEX Archers' DPS. You're lacking Crit, raw damage (making Sparks and Dom. Blessings less effective) so I dont believe a few % of Channeling would really dissolve the difference in DPS between Arcane/LA.

And, normal attacks might be cheaper to use but in my example (post 63 in this thread) the arcane archer's rate of fire with skills was faster than normal shots with a sling shot, unless you were in really specialized circumstances (like maybe a boss fight against a metal immune boss with a tank that could keep a pure archer from pulling aggro even though the pure archer was attacking for the whole time and not having to wait for the tank to build threat nor pause because of getting too many crits).

Yeah I call massive bs. Casting a skill -even with a lot of channeling, isn't faster than a proper slingshot (which have -interval). Even if the skills had no charge time at all anymore, the traveling speed of most our skills isn't that fast.

And if you were pointing at the lightning skills with that paragraph about metal immunity, consider cooldowns. You can have all the casting speed you want, cooldowns still exist. And skills also dont seamlessly follow eachother up.

Fleuri - Sanctuary

The sad thing here is that Kireina and I have been going back and forth for three pairs of posts now, and if Kireina has a point I am not getting it, and likewise Kireina apparently has not understood much of anything I have written.

(I get that Kireina is saying "LA good, AA bad" but I am not convinced by her presentation:)

Kireina - Dreamweaver wrote: »

I dont see damage tables anywhere, just a pwcalc with an LA-Channeling Archer. with pure archer I assume you mean a DEX built, LA Archer without channeling **** and stat/crit-adding gear. Channeling does not make you match an Archer in skill damage, because channeling adds no damage. Rephrase that sentence if you meant something else. As it is, you're claiming channeling = increase phys.atk.

I was referring to the builds and conditions I listed in post 63. I am sure you know skills take time. If both archers started attacking simultaneously with the same attack, when the arcane archer's shot landed the light armor archer would have done zero damage. So, if the battle lasts for just one shot (like maybe if they both had warsouls), then arcane archer damage would typically be greater than zero and higher light armor archer could pump out. So... I have corrected my incorrect statement that their damage would be equal.

b:cute

But I was not talking about first shot damage, I was talking about damage delivered in 10 seconds. My phrasing was clumsy, which looks bad when you take my comment out of context, but I do not feel like going back and rephrasing my shorthand phrase so that you can take it out of context and have it be accurate by its lonesome self.

Kireina - Dreamweaver wrote: »

Yeah I call massive bs. Casting a skill -even with a lot of channeling, isn't faster than a proper slingshot (which have -interval). Even if the skills had no charge time at all anymore, the traveling speed of most our skills isn't that fast.

I posted the pwcalc build links already -- they are my first three lines in post #63 in this thread. If you or anyone else has specific questions about my numbers or even my conclusions, please ask them. I suppose I could try and guess which points you did not understand and give you a bunch of numbers which represent that part of my math. But I do not feel you read much of anything I wrote, and if you are just going to be all "Too Long, Didn't Read", I do not see how any numbers would help you. Or if you are just going to make general comments which mean I would have to repeat everything I posted earlier, and then some, I just am not interested in doing so.

But I might be wrong about your posts, and if you have specific questions I will try and answer them.

Kireina - Dreamweaver wrote: »

Yeah I call massive bs. Casting a skill -even with a lot of channeling, isn't faster than a proper slingshot (which have -interval). Even if the skills had no charge time at all anymore, the traveling speed of most our skills isn't that fast.

And if you were pointing at the lightning skills with that paragraph about metal immunity, consider cooldowns. You can have all the casting speed you want, cooldowns still exist. And skills also dont seamlessly follow eachother up.

My hypothetical arcane archer (I posted her pwcalc link in my first line in post #63 in this thread) had -36% channelling. If channelling gear reduces casting time (which people with massive channelling gear have reported to be the case in these forums), then a 1 second 0.6 casting skill will go off in 0.64 second and have 0.384 seconds casting time. This would correspond to an attack interval between 0.95 and 1.0 attacks per second. When I last checked, most slingshots had a slower attack interval than that, even with good -interval gear. And my hypothetical arcane archer does not have the best possible arcane archer gear, either.

Of course, some skills take longer but if we are talking about sustained damage per second then we need to remember that our skill shots get extra damage per shot from our skills.

Also, this arcane archer with the build that I posted, would be able to shoot a stunning shot faster than a slingshot user without any -interval gear could launch a normal attack. That would not be faster than a typical high level slingshot user but that kind of speed can not be all bad. And of course an arcane archer with better gear would also shoot faster. A rank 6 ring would give my hypothetical arcane archer an "attack interval" of 0.78 seconds for stunning shot or 0.93 seconds for aim low.

But you were right, I did not take into account flight time for any skill nor for normal attacks. I do not know how to measure that part, so for now I am going to ignore it. If you have some way of measuring or comparing flight times, I would be glad to hear it.

Anyways, yes, cooldowns were the reason that metal immunity would mess up an arcane archer's dps. An arcane archer with fast channelling will be running out of skills to use, long before a boss is dead, if she does not include some metal skills in her attack rotations.

Telarith - Sanctuary

One other thing you need to add into the calculations though, Fleuri, is the recover time after skills. During that time, at a really rough estimate about 1 second, you aren't dealing any damage. Auto-attack does not suffer from that, until you try using some skill. While you can reduce/remove recovery every other time, it also depends on animation sequences and skill order how much effect that can have.

Also, are you able to do a skill projection, taking into consideration skill CDs, for a 15 sec continued spike? That would be for a rough idea of a charm and a half of damage, to allow for charm tick. Kind of interested to see how all that would stack up together, if you're willing to do a mock-up of skills and expected damage, I promise to read the post as well

Fleuri - Sanctuary

Telarith - Sanctuary wrote: »

One other thing you need to add into the calculations though, Fleuri, is the recover time after skills. During that time, at a really rough estimate about 1 second, you aren't dealing any damage. Auto-attack does not suffer from that, until you try using some skill. While you can reduce/remove recovery every other time, it also depends on animation sequences and skill order how much effect that can have.

Also, are you able to do a skill projection, taking into consideration skill CDs, for a 15 sec continued spike? That would be for a rough idea of a charm and a half of damage, to allow for charm tick. Kind of interested to see how all that would stack up together, if you're willing to do a mock-up of skills and expected damage, I promise to read the post as well

If I understand properly our "casting time" is our recovery time after we have used a skill when we can not do anything. I have not yet figured out how much of our normal attack delay happens before damage and how much after, but if we are talking about just using skills then we can ignore delays from normal attacks.

And, I can work up an attack sequence for a specific target, but that gets into specifics which would of course change with a different attack sequence. I need to think about this because an arcane archer would probably be forced to use attacks an archer without any arcane gear would not use because of cooldown issues. Also, this would be artificial because I would not include gaps for kiting. But I try and think of something.

Quilue - Sanctuary

To test out your plan, and whether you can realistically output skills at such speeds, get a theoretical damage output for a specified period of time assuming under -20% channeling, then try this out in Heaven's Wrath.

Telarith - Sanctuary

Channel is how long it takes for the blue bar to fill up, cast is how long that blue bar hangs on the screen. Aftercast is the time when the bar goes away, before allowing you to start another channeling. Just tested it out with different cast times, myriad had a 3 sec cast and the blue bar hangs there quite a while after it's full. So aftercast will still influence damage output with skills, but you can remove one every other time.

Kireina - Dreamweaver

Fleuri - Sanctuary wrote: »

But you were right, I did not take into account flight time for any skill nor for normal attacks. I do not know how to measure that part, so for now I am going to ignore it. If you have some way of measuring or comparing flight times, I would be glad to hear it.

You can't measure that unless you Fraps them and count the frames. But I think it's quite obvious Deadly Shot/Sharptooth/Thunderous have a much slower travelling time.

Also, while your casting theory is spot on about skills that take 1 second, not all of our skills take that short to cast. Ofcourse you could stick to 1 second skills, but a lot of those are quite ineffective for chaining skills. Oh, and fighting vs a Fire or Metal monster would give the LA Archer that uses normal attacks the benefit of Blazing Arrow and perhaps the Wiz water buff, where a skilling Archer would have trouble with the Fire monster due to lack of Water skills and flood of Metal ones.

Oh, and yes I have looked at your Arcane pwcalc and I'm not quite sure why you would put the Heavenly Lord rings on all your builds. Regardless, if we look at the gap between phys.atk and crit, the one thing you can't account for is the Crits and lack of Accuracy and a widening of the gap between those two when Sparking and perhaps even Gloomed, effectively putting a 5k phys.atk gap between us without a Dom. Bless. even. If I would do a decently high Crit and you miss, it'll take you several crits to even get back on par with my DPS.

You are also taking away any versatility, where normal LA Archers can handle both Phys/Mag resistant monsters, Mag Def ones will eat you up, your normal damage is lacking so it'll take a while to die.

Anyways, yes, cooldowns were the reason that metal immunity would mess up an arcane archer's dps. An arcane archer with fast channelling will be running out of skills to use, long before a boss is dead, if she does not include some metal skills in her attack rotations.

Not even immunity, go cast some Metal on a Fire boss, huge drop in DPS.

Ussichu - Sanctuary

2 things I don't like about this build.

1. Lost of -interval gear, arms and chest contain interval gear which is more vital to an archer than -channeling.

2. No fists

Kireina - Dreamweaver

Ussichu - Sanctuary wrote: »

2 things I don't like about this build.

1. Lost of -interval gear, arms and chest contain interval gear which is more vital to an archer than -channeling.

2. No fists

This.

If you add some insane 15% channeling sleeve to your Arcane Archer, why don't even the playing field and add some 3x -0.10 Interval sleeve and such to the LA? See how that goes vs casting? It seems a little bit convenient to put just the green TT90 on the LA and then muffle in some 3stars with Channeling on the Arcane one. Your comparisons are obviously flawed and biased towards the channeling one because you want to be right. I could just negate your 30% channel archer by putting 3x 0.1 interval on every armor piece. You're trying to win this argument by putting slow weapons (lol Bl. Radiance) and whatever high armor you could find on the LA and putting some magic non-existant casting gear on the Arcane.

WaffleChan - Sanctuary

Not even immunity, go cast some Metal on a Fire boss, huge drop in DPS.

just to be a pain in the **** lol... fire monsters arent resistant to metal. look at this fire immune boss: http://www.pwdatabase.com/mob/8217

only raise / drop in defenses is its water and fire defense. metal is equivalent to wood and earth, it doesnt make any difference.

Kireina - Dreamweaver

WaffleChan - Sanctuary wrote: »

just to be a pain in the **** lol... fire monsters arent resistant to metal. look at this fire immune boss: http://www.pwdatabase.com/mob/8217

only raise / drop in defenses is its water and fire defense. metal is equivalent to wood and earth, it doesnt make any difference.

Ah I see, I don't really have elemented skills to compare my Metal skills too but it seemed to be pretty halfassed against the many battles vs Pyro, I assumed the Fire was to blame.

WaffleChan - Sanctuary

good thing to compare would be the level of your lightning move and considering how much resistance his def would mitigate. come to think of it, id love to know how monster damage works... could make a damage calc if i did ):.

Brutally - Lost City

???
Arcane?
No.
b:bye

Devoted - Lost City

why is this 9 pages?

lets remove all posts besides the one above and close this thread.

Ligeia - Harshlands

Wow, everything exists on the internet.

At high levels, autoshotting is the best DPS you can do on anything but a Barbarian or a Blademaster who doesn't have Magic Marrow up, which costs no MP, plus an MP charm would facilitate spamming skills all day if the need arises. To be honest, I can keep up with any skill usage except Barrage with level 60 blue pots. The only advantage I could see in wearing arcane armor is improved defenses, but it's really not worth going to the extent of turning your class which is supposed to kill things into something that doesn't actually do anything.

Fleuri - Sanctuary

So... ok... any specific build can be quibbled with. But lets consider an example case...

For our Pure archer, we have
http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=28116380bc67c597
physical attack: 4661..7938
attack rate: 0.71 attacks/second
critical hit: 34%
weapon damage: 1269..2161
aware of the void

For our arcane archer, we have
http://pwcalc.ru/pwi/?char=ffc04e4759916fba
physical attack: 3130..5746
attack rate: 0.62 attacks/second
critical hit: 16%
-69% channelling (assumed to also reduce cast time)
weapon damage: 1067..1959
aware of the myriad

Both have all their skills maxed, within the limits of being level 90.

Clearly, the arcane archer sucks. So, to illustrate this, they will both be fighting our friendly neighborhood strawman. Our strawman has 9001 for all defenses, and 9001 health, and is wearing a guardian charm, and will be recovering 350 health per second except for the first and twelfth seconds of combat. For this rigged battle, no apothecaries will be used, and no genie skills will be used.

The combat begins with a spark, and is followed by 15 seconds of attacks. This means our "pure" demon archer will get 15 attacks. Our demon archer gets 635..1081 extra damage from blazing arrow, and 952..1621 damage from bow mastery. With a critical hit rate of 34% we have an average damage per shot of 19889 or a 15 second total of 298335. Our target has slightly over 71% damage reduction and this gets reduced for PvP, so our average damage delivered to target will be 53276. Our strawman probably lasted six seconds.

So now, let's see how our arcane archer's numbers look.

Sage blazing arrow will give us +640..1175 fire damage, and sage bow masery will give us an extra 960..1763 physical attack. That's no worse than the demon archer but not really better, either. Our arcane archer's skills get an add of 2270 average damage to each attack (except thunderous blast which gets only 1362 average).

So... here's a possible sequence of attacks for the arcane archer:

(start with sage spark)
L10 sharpened tooth arrow, average 18711 damage
0.806 seconds
sage frost arrow, average 18687 damage
1.302 seconds
sage quick shot, average 18255 damage
1.798 seconds
sage take aim (cancelled) 0.7 seconds (assume 0.1 seconds to cancel), average 24121? damage
2.498 seconds
L10 thunder shock, average 17915 damage (16644 is metal)
3.211 seconds
sage lightning strike, average 19777 damage (18506 is metal)
3.769 seconds
L10 stunning arrow, average 17388 damage
4.42 seconds
sage frost arrow, average 18687 damage
4.916 seconds
sage quick shot, average 18255 damage
5.412 seconds
sage take aim (cancelled), average 24121? damage
6.112 seconds
L10 thunderous blast, average 17965 damage (all metal)
6.28 seconds
L10 aim low, average 19370 damage
6.776 seconds
L10 knockback arrow, average 18879 damage
7.272 seconds
L10 serrated arrow, average 17467 damage (two ticks)
7.768 seconds
sage frost arrow, average 18687 damage
8.264 seconds
sage quick shot, average 18255 damage
8.76 seconds
sage take aim (cancelled), average 24121? damage
9.46 seconds
L10 thunder shock, average 17915 damage (16644 is metal)
10.173 seconds
sage lightning strike, average 19777 damage (18506 is metal)
10.731 seconds
L10 deadly shot, average 21130 damage
11.847 seconds
sage frost arrow, average 18687 damage
12.343 seconds
sage quick shot, average 18255 damage
12.839 seconds
sage take aim (cancelled), average 24121? damage
13.539 seconds
L10 vicious arrow, average 15345 damage (no ticks)
14.035 seconds
L10 thunderous blast, average 17965 damage (all metal)

That's.. um 501121 damage? And, our strawman has only 7561 health. And, our metal attacks will be doing an extra 28.5% damage because we are reducing metal defense 50%.... which works out to something like 97076 damage transmitted to our target.

So... our loser arcane archer delivers an extra 82% damage to a target with reduced health, and our strawman probably died before we managed to use any metal attacks.

Does anyone want to check my math? LOL

b:chuckle

Maybe sage take aim does not always add 500% damage? Maybe I typed in some numbers wrong? I am just playing with numbers here, and I am not trying things out, in-game. Then again, just maybe, arcane archers with good gear might be able to do decent damage per second?

Kireina - Dreamweaver

gonna tl;dr on your giant number post without sources. I'm still quite amazed you thought skills where totally affected by channeling and didn't count in the Cast time to compare it to attackrate (go hover over a skill, you'll understand)

Asterelle - Sanctuary_1381265973

A few rules for stringing skills

A skill has two parts:

channeling time -> casting time

1) while channeling the skill can be interrupted
2) damage is dealt at the very end of channeling time
3) cooldown begins at end of channeling time
4) the skill cannot begin channeling again until the cooldown has finished
5) no other skills can be used until the casting time has finished

-channeling only effects the channel time not the cast time and not the cooldown time.

Telarith - Sanctuary

Few things wrong with the math it would seem.

First, you didn't include the after-casts on the skills. This is the static time wasted between skill use, where you just finished casting, and can't channel the new skill yet. It is around 1 second each time, but with timing you can remove 1 out of every 2 done. This will make the damage worse on its own.

Pretty sure Take Aim is listed as more damage than it would deal. Chage cancelled should mean a smaller weapon % of damage, but it's listed as if it had full damage it looks like. If you can get full damage without waiting for the charge, why would anyone bother wasting the time charging? And every time you do a cancel shot, it should not be possible to remove after-cast afterwards. So use it as the 2nd skill of every 2 skill combo so it won't adversely affect damage.

It would be nigh on impossible to get the gears needed for a 69% channeling reduction as an archer. The pieces that have multiple -chan are very rare to even get, usually only 9%, and go for very high amounts of money. These pieces are already very coveted by 3 classes in the game, soon to be 4. A piece that gives -12%+ would be able to buy someone endgame gear should they have it, so acquiring three -15% would be more expensive on its own than equipping a normal build archer.

Though to help your comparisons, add in available damage buffs to your calculations. Those boost off of your weapon damage, and make the % difference of pure vs. arcane's weapon multiplier less. The more diluted the variable based off of dexterity is, the less difference in physical damage.

Also, has anyone checked to see if demon spark also affects the channeling speed of archer skills? It says it speeds attack rate even on the cleric one, but it boosts channeling by that much as well. Maybe it will do the same for archer skill channeling as well?

Quilue - Sanctuary

other classes have a -channel buff. archer demon spark gives no such thing.

Fleuri - Sanctuary

Ok... first... i did include casting time -- but I reduced them by the same percent that I reduced channelling time. This was based on reports from wizards that have had a lot of channelling gear.

Second, I put take aim on 500% because of its skill description on ecatomb, which says "Sage version always gives 500% of weapon damage". If this is incorrect, I imagine I should use some lesser amount. But it's a small fraction of the overall damage.

And, yes, I agree that these gears are nearly impossible to get. But that would be a differerent issue.

But I left out buffs from other clases, because I felt they would tilt the balance further in favor of the arcane archer.

Quilue - Sanctuary

nuh uh! cast time never decreases, otherwise wizards would be able to shell out a lot more nukes than they do under sutra.

i've played with sutra, it's like 4 nukes at most in 5s and that's it.

Kireina - Dreamweaver

Fleuri - Sanctuary wrote: »

Ok... first... i did include casting time -- but I reduced them by the same percent that I reduced channelling time.

The Cast period is not reduced by -Channeling gear. You should really learn the basics before you start making flawed formulas.

Falcondance - Heavens Tear

Kireina - Dreamweaver wrote: »

The Cast period is not reduced by -Channeling gear. You should really learn the basics before you start making flawed formulas.

You should stop bashing Fleuri, especially if you tl;dr on the post in question which you then proceed to bash about. In addition, if you disagree, you should post your own formula. You do say you know the basics.

Olba - Sanctuary

Making such "models" is pointless, as you have no input lag in any of them.

Also, you don't have anything that deals with chance to hit.

Also, if you want to make plausible comparisons, you shouldn't use any "budget", but instead have both characters use the absolute best items that they can. Otherwise, the "budget" will limit one of them and could be used as a justification to render the comparison as pointless. Same of course applies to character levels and statting.

Also, to get an accurate model, something like 15 seconds of time is kinda pointless. You should be able to make an optimized string of attacks for the Arcane Archer, then get the actual damage/second and compare those.

Either way, you have oversimplified the model and there were some obvious flaws, such as assuming that -channel% affects Cast Time and that the 500% on Take Aim is not dependent on the charge time.